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computomatic

369 karma · joined October 19, 2022

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computomatic··on No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector
It’s a business-scale cost. When I say materially useful, I mean replacing multiple salaries and improving quality at the same time. Not some variant of “make an existing employee 20% faster.”

The personal hobby version is to get the Claude max plan.

computomatic··on No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector
“Marginal” improvement isn’t really going to be enough. Products need to be closer to 10x better than the alternative to get traction (which can be divided across several dimensions). AI, I think, is just starting to get there.
computomatic··on No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector
I don’t know about you, but for me materially useful AI costs around $10,000/mo in tokens. But it is very useful.

Claude subscriptions help, but only if I come in with the expertise to build the entire system around the model and I don’t mind the whole thing grinding to a halt when my session limit is saturated. Anyone selling the system off the shelf is going to be charging API rates. Computers were cheap in comparison.

computomatic··on Dream-1
I came across this recently and was initially surprised too. It makes sense when you consider that any company trying to build models (or an agent/value-add layer on top of a model) needs benchmarks. The best funded will do the full vertical - build their benchmarks and models together - but many will outsource the benchmark. This is particularly valuable when the dataset is difficult to compile (robotics being a prime example) - it makes more sense to let the benchmark vendor focus on that.
computomatic··on Dream-1
Wouldn’t it just be easier to ask their team to upvote the post? They probably all have legitimate hacker news accounts already and are happy to upvote their work.
computomatic··on New Apple TV 4K
It’s more of a fun anecdote, but people forget that there was once a plague of stolen Apple devices. Apple customers were frequently targeted by pickpockets, etc. because of the value of the devices. I have no evidence but I’ve always believed this was the root of the privacy focus - Apple could lock devices to biometrics and eliminate various workarounds, making stolen devices worthless, and the thefts evaporated practically overnight.

Phone theft is a growing problem again, but it’s still less common than it was because they need to get an unlocked device, and I don’t hear them targeting Apple in particular.

computomatic··on Apple HomeView
> when you want to let them jump in and out of multiple apps (e.g. pick what game they want to play on their own)

The solution to that is Assistive Access.

It’s more painful to use than it should be, but it absolutely solves this problem.

computomatic··on So, you’d like to sell your print issues of The Onion?
I’ve had the privilege to work at a company with a highly aligned legal team. It turns out there are quite a few people who get law degrees and are just sensible, chill, fun people. And if you can hire them onto staff, there’s no limit to the awesome things you can do.
computomatic··on Apple Pass Designer
Which also seems a bit silly because rural areas have plenty of events and many use e-tickets. Maybe OP just doesn't like events.
computomatic··on Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1
GPUs aren’t becoming outdated in practice. An H100 still rents for something like $3/hour. The only reason to take them offline today would be due to limited data centre capacity. In space, that doesn’t apply.

For now, at least, this market doesn’t behave like the one for CPUs which are more fungible and general purpose.

Rather than thinking about the value of a GPU over time, it’s more useful to think about the value of a model (or generation of models) that will run on the GPU.

Sol 6 launched last week. People will build products/agents/systems on Sol 6. Many of those will end up staying on that model for the lifetime of the end product, which means there will be long-term demand for the model, and that means long-term demand for the GPU set that the model runs on.

For now, at least, models are tuned to a specific GPU and don’t move to the newest hardware very easily.

At the end of the day, will the lifetime value of a GPU exceed the cost of launching it into space? That’s TBD. But there’s growing evidence it might.

computomatic··on Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]
How do you evaluate that?
computomatic··on Apple iPhone 18 Pro Camera test
Zoom in on the large tree in the background. It looks as if it has ornamental balls hanging off it.
computomatic··on AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran
Yes, this, and the article seems pretty clear that only "some data stored exclusively in Bahrain" is affected. Add to that the option to store data with reduced redundancy (in S3, for example), and I don't really see what the drama is about.

Amazon only claims "99.999999999% durability" per year, even for the properly replicated stuff.[0]

[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/DataDu...

computomatic··on Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route
Suezmax tankers, panamax, etc. Anything bigger needs to go around
computomatic··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
You can request a ride via Uber. They aren't building the tech. I find it a bit unclear who is operating the fleet (Uber or Wayve), but that seems irrelevant when the question is whether the vehicles' autonomous technology is safe.
computomatic··on I have a theory that software drives people insane
This is likely the start to a useful approach. I suspect the crux of the challenge is that engineers who need to write code get very pedantic in their questions and picking the answers apart (because we need to be! code leaves no room for ambiguity or intuition). And you can imagine how that feels from the other side. I imagine a lot of people feel like an engineer asking about the actual problem feels like getting goaded into some sort of pedantic debate. A natural response will be to try to dictate what to build (often micromanaging) and avoid the discussion about why at all costs. Writing offers a bit of a neutralizing buffer, at least.
computomatic··on Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives
Uber exited the autonomous vehicle race several years ago. AFAICT, largely because of this mismatch. Who's still in this area (in a serious way) that behaves like that?
computomatic··on Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)
Interesting idea. Is there a practical way to obtain those permit records at scale?
computomatic··on A/I shuts down
Most of this has me rolling my eyes (“cadre of radical hackers”? really?), but this part is interesting:

> The A/I Collective… manually vets all potential users for ideological affinity before granting them access to its infrastructure.

What is the truth behind that? Such behaviour would undermine A/I’s claim they are akin to Gmail if they explicitly are not a neutral ISP. After that, it becomes a question of degrees: what were their specific criteria for access to the platform?

Asking out of genuine curiosity. I wasn’t familiar with this group before today.

computomatic··on GPT-6 Astra
In 1990 a Scottsdale 486 w/ 4MB of Ram and a 211 MB hard drive cost $6737 (plus tax).

In 1992 a Solidtech 486 w/ 4 MB of RAM and a slightly-smaller 125 MB hard drive sold for $2195

Both advertised in Computer Shopper and you can find their catalogues(?) online.

My numbers were slightly off apparently, but is that enough to change the point?

computomatic··on The death of San Francisco's Market Street
Add in shops, and I think you've just described a mall.
computomatic··on GPT-6 Astra
It was both. 90% of people never needed nor purchased a bleeding-edge computer. The mid-tier was "good enough" and far closer to affordable for most people; though, that bar also moved upward every year.

If you bought a mid-tier computer that was good enough for what you needed, then you probably didn't shop/compare for the next few years and didn't notice. But if you shelled out $7-10k for a top-of-the-line system and paid attention to progress, you'd easily see that become the mid-tier $1000 option within two years or less. This is how it was in the 90's PC boom, at least. Likely the same for the decades before, not sure how it went in the 2000's.

computomatic··on Student teacher arrested for private Snapchat message
Most likely a SaaS app that auto-saves, but didn’t save properly. Then closing the laptop caused a network disconnect, and the in-browser app did not recover gracefully while awaiting reconnect on wake-up and lost all unsaved data.

This would have been unbelievable to me before this year. Then I used PowerPoint via the browser and found this level of data loss is a regular occurrence.

computomatic··on FDA clears blood test to aid evaluation for Alzheimer's disease
I'm sorry your dad is facing this disease. Hopefully he can find something that helps slow it. I don't know what the side-effects are that he could be facing but, as someone who lost a parent to alzheimers, let me say that anything is probably preferable to advanced-stage dementia. I hope to see real, reliable treatments in my lifetime.
computomatic··on OpenRouter is joining Stripe
Follow-up: Somehow in all that I forgot the most obvious pairing. Stripe wants to solve how agents pay for things. They’ve been quite open about this. Seems obvious that any solution to that is going to be through the model platform layer - so they just bought a major platform layer.
computomatic··on OpenRouter is joining Stripe
Stripe is positioning themselves as one of the leading adopters of AI internally. I don't know of public stats but I estimate they're spending on the order of $millions per week on tokens. I assume they've adopted Openrouter and the majority of that spend is going via Openrouter. So they understand the product value, they understand the current gaps, and there's also a threat mitigation. They've likely become very dependent on Openrouter and someone is going to buy it - so they may as well negate the risk to that. (Threat mitigation alone is not worth $7B but it justifies a certain premium.)

They also have very complementary problems and skills. The long-term roadmap for routers is auto-routing; that is, turning traffic into signals into automated decisions. Stripe has a lot of overlapping talent and experience from fraud-detection and likely other products.

computomatic··on OpenRouter is joining Stripe
My surface-level assessment is that building a router is easy, but routing efficiently is difficult. For the latter problem, traffic provides signals which you can use to improve routing rules, creating a feedback loop. More traffic => more feedback => better routing. So a lot of the value of Openrouter would be that they are the most adopted router (I think?) and so likely have the most data to (potentially) produce the best router. I'm only speculating.
computomatic··on YC startups are abandoning .com
Perhaps they finally finished their migration off .su
computomatic··on I obtained Claude Opus 5 system prompt
The web app system prompts are published publicly by Anthropic: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/release-notes/system-pro...

Interestingly, doesn't include the text in TFA (doesn't cover copyright at all). Not sure if hallucinated or referring to a system prompt at another layer.

computomatic··on PGSimCity - How PostgreSQL Works
Try the tour. It’s exactly that.
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